The Book Bank Project is an initiative from Dymocks Children’s Charities and is undertaken in the context of the success of the Premier’s Reading Challenge. The Project provides schoolchildren with one book they have chosen from the Reading Challenge every term. Students are encouraged to share and swap their books with their classmates after they have read them, creating, as a result, a ‘Book Bank’ within the classroom.

This episode is different in being entirely about personality with no policy content. On the other hand, the issues of personality are pretty substantial!

It is also different in that it comes at a time of historic challenge for labor and social democratic parties through contraction of the industrial base, globalization, the limit of public sector spending and so on. This party crisis – for once the word not hyperbole – erupts when the party is struggling with 30 percent support. In the 50s and 60s outbreaks of self-indulgence occurred when the party could routinely claim 45 percent of the electorate. Perilous times, indeed

I have declined about 20 requests to talk because I think it unseemly for me to become another commentator on the party predicament, feeding off its temporarily disabled body.

I will say that alone of Australian institutions the ALP conducts no systemic training for its personnel, no mentoring, no coaching, no management of high potential talent. And we pay the price with spokespeople thrust into jobs with no preparation and no support or guidance. Good cases are lost because nobody can articulate them, our debating prowess has leached from the organization. So has personality and color, as ministers end sentences with rising inflections sounding querulous and timid or just read scripts in monotones, misuse language (say “myself” when they mean “I” ) and talk jargon. For Godsake, we saved Australia from the GFC and rebuilt the schools! Yet since 2007 we have lost the capacity to use persuasive, concrete, uplifting language to talk about our achievements.

A change of party culture is more vital than any rules change to rescue the old party from flatness and mediocrity.

Oh, and don’t overlook this: if Abbott, Turnbull and Hockey were kidnapped by Martians who would take over on their side?

With Mayor Mathew Dickerson (right) and Councillors

In Dubbo I launched 2012 National Year of Reading at the Dubbo branch library with Mayor Councillor Mathew Dickerson and former Independent State Member Dawn Fardell.

I spoke on familiar themes about reading enabling one to live other lives, to stretch one’s consciousness. I referred to some of the books that have lived in my imagination, some for decades.

Naturally, it was great to spend some time with people who love reading.

John Bayliss, Macquarie Regional Library Director, took me to the Museum and Art Gallery. I saw with Museum Director Andrew Glassop an exhibition called Space Invaders, which began with the National Gallery of Australia, of street art.

A big contrast with the paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. I liked the art. It’s part of the art of our times.

In the adjacent local museum, I was captured by photos of Dubbo’s streets in the early years of the last century, by the Federation Era bullock-drawn wool-cart and by a red coat that may have been worn by Australian volunteers in the Sudan War.

It is hardly a revelation that Julia Gillard or her supporters did something similar, although the Party should cease the practice of circulating National Secretariat polling in the context of leadership challenges. Polling is a matter between the National Secretariat and the Leader’s office.

Four Corners had no revelations, only gossip.

The Federal Government has expanded uranium mining and opened exports to India. South Australia boasts what will become the world’s largest uranium mine. The ban for NSW reflected the anti-nuclear sentiment of the 1980s and it is irrelevant today when to beat global warming we urgently need every available source of carbon-free energy.

Prime Minister Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan won the first week.

Look at the indicators. Slipper is performing in the chair. Wilkie is voting for removal of the private health insurance rebate for well-off Australians. So are the Greens. With all the constraints of a hung parliament, the government is continuing to get its program up.

It is also continuing to stay on message: focusing on the economy and jobs. The troubles of a two-speed economy are actually helping Labor. The troubles of the car industry, for example, cast the Labor government as the defender of manufacturing jobs through “co-investment” and “job support”. By contrast, Tony Abbott has to enter his party room and order his team to stop speaking out and broadcasting their differences on industry policy.

Moreover, the Opposition’s three spokespeople were caught with different lines on how quickly they could bring the budget into surplus. I’m waiting for the Opposition to address this question: will they reinstate the middle-class welfare removed in Labor budgets, such as dependent spouse rebate and vehicle fringe benefits?

The Coalition will abolish the carbon tax. The Coalition will abolish the mining tax. The Coalition will find room for income tax cuts…and close a $70 billion black hole.

How? Not the old staples of cutting advertising and consultancies. And not simply declaring that government will be smaller.

Speaking to 300 water scientists from around Australia at the 6th Australian Stream Management Conference in Canberra

Before this audience I had a chance to relive some of the climactic battles over water policy during my time as a Minister for Environment and Premier. I recalled my decision to ban canal estates which were so destructive of river quality. I relived the battles to deliver environmental allocations valley by valley, for the first time allocating water as a right to great inland wetlands. I also gave them an account of the 1999 Sydney water crisis.

I told them that when they argued the case for environmental reform, they needed to settle on the killer facts and use concrete language. Talking about “sustainability” was jargonistic. Better to be concrete and say precisely what you mean.

This Tuesday I visited the UNSW Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra to inspect their special collection. It’s an honour to join the Advisory Council of the Academy. I have always believed military history to be a major strand of Australian history. After all, we are more inclined than most other nations to enter wars! (As the SMH’s Peter Hartcher pointed out on Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live on Monday night). Gallipoli occurred only 14 years into Australia’s national history and was seen as our first national test.

There was some Civil War material in the Academy’s collection. Yes, I only had to see General Longstreet’s memoirs, with their famous chapter allocating responsibility for the Gettysburg disaster, to feel the tug of the Civil War all over again.

His counsel is that we simply “forget the one-line Bill of Rights against discrimination.” That is, the proposal from the so-called Expert Panel that we lift anti-discrimination laws that affect indigenous Australians out of statutory law and plant them in the constitution.

The people are not going to vote for it because they will see straight away it raises too many questions. As Craven says, “the sweeping guarantee against discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity or colour is a one-clause Bill of Rights.”

He says:

At the crudest level, what on earth does it mean? The answer is, whatever the judges say. The examples of negative potential that will be used by the “No” case are so hideous they cannot even be responsibly canvassed, but they will be deployed to devastating effect.

If the Australian people have doubts about what it means and, more specifically, how judges might interpret it, they will vote no. As Craven says, that would be a tragedy because “it will look like a repudiation of every step of progress over the past 50 years. It will be the final insult to our indigenous people.”